Claudia Winkleman’s chat show is afraid of Claudia Winkleman

It should not have taken this long for the BBC to give a woman a major chat show. Perhaps that’s why Claudia Winkleman had to do a self-deprecating trailer about how bad she was going to be, as if Strictly and Traitors hadn’t established her as Britain’s top presenting talent.

And The Claudia Winkleman Show certainly isn’t bad. Too much is at stake for that. But it has a long way to go before it becomes compelling Friday-night viewing.

The BBC has given it a surprisingly late slot – 10.45pm is past many people’s bedtime – the set is dark and intimate, Traitors-like, and there is a little bit of swearing. Winkleman wants to know how the guests would describe the colour of the sofa (dark teal, apparently) and there is some awkward badinage with the set designer, who is sitting in the audience.

Winkleman is wearing a jacket and tie with brogues, and her tie is not quite flush with the top of her collar. Wonderful. No one should underestimate the breakthrough this represents for female TV hosts, who have been perching on stilettos in tight-fitting dresses since the 1950s.

Everyone is just a tiny bit on edge, because they all know how important this is for Winkleman and indeed for the future of the entire format. Will Claudia be better than Graham Norton? Do we really want her to be?

The celebrities are there to promote whatever they have just acted or written, which is standard practice for a chat show but means the conversation can’t flow freely. All of these outputs are very wonderful, of course, though there is a slightly awkward moment when Jeff Goldblum reads out a passage at random from Tom Allen’s hilarious new book, in which one of the characters has decided to oppose a planning application. On the other hand, what could be more British?

Now and again Winkleman calls on a member of the audience who has a tenuous connection to one of the stars. Goldblum’s first UK tour stop is in Wolverhampton, so a man who lives there says he should get off the train and get straight back on it again. Ho ho, not really!

But we never learn how Goldblum could spend his two days there and the schtick is really just another opportunity to hold the West Midlands in contempt. Again, this is at least something the whole country can agree on.

Someone in the audience designs pencils; Goldblum doesn’t like the clicky ones. Jennifer Saunders lives near a woman who helps toads cross the road. They don’t say thank you but they do make cute little squeaks. The theatre where Allen is performing may have a ghost, so a psychic a few rows back tells him she can talk to the dead. But not tonight, because she’s off-duty.

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The celebrities do not hide their boredom. I give the normies another fortnight at most.

But then Vanessa Williams explains she has a dog. It’s a Great Dane (Allen had one of those once, he can’t remember his name). Would Allen like a dog? Because as luck would have it, a dog is waiting backstage!

Percy jumps onto the dark teal and accepts some biscuits. Allen explains that he likes his soft furnishings too much to risk taking Percy home to Bromley. Nowadays there appears to be very little in British life that cannot be improved by a dog, but it does feel a little too Blue Peter.

The CW Show is very busy, which makes me suspect that the BBC doesn’t quite trust Winkleman to keep the conversation going by herself. It should.

What we see here is sympathetic, self-deprecating Claudia, without many of the flashes of arch humour that made her so compelling on Strictly. Some of her asides are a little off, even if they hint at the other, provocative Claudia (“Of course I have a dog. I breastfeed him”). She isn’t helped by the line-up of guests, who are reluctant to talk to each other except to agree on the fabulousness of a mutual hairdresser, Sven.

Despite the constant interruptions to chat to the audience – or perhaps because of them – the viewer’s attention flags. Saunders once planned to take Ecstasy with Dawn French, but they kept putting it off and the pill vanished from the mantelpiece. Late middle-aged Britain chuckles, but Saunders must have better material at her disposal.

Winkleman has enough goodwill and time to relax into the job and assert her personality without fawning. She is not at ease in the armchair yet, and it shows.

If Graham Norton is ever to ease into retirement, she will need to remind us why she got the job in the first place. It wasn’t to proffer dog treats and ask what makes a really good pencil.

The Claudia Winkleman Show is on BBC iPlayer